Media Arts and Technology

The Dance of the Fulcrum is a performative excerpt and Kroumatograph is an installation component from a project in progress, Psychagogy. The overall work, meaning “the leading of souls” in ancient Greek, is both a transmedia song cycle and installation. The whole work explores musical experience and form as a function of both time and space. During the performative portion, as voice, piano, and electronics sound, two dancers— Maud Watel-Kazak and Tim Wood— engage in the art of sculpting music with the body. Using visual projections from a VR head-mounted display worn by one dancer and a real-time 3D spatial virtual drawing tool controlled by the other dancer, the two explore the space between music and sculpture, the actual and the virtual, the permanent and the ephemeral. In the second half, the audience is invited to explore a 3D-tracked environment brought alive with a both a grid of interacting standing waves and a grid different thermal and olfactory currents.

Through 3D-spatial trackers and sensors on the piano, moving strings and moving people algorithmically modulate the transmodal environment temporally in turn, uniting spatial and temporal elements into continuous, spatiotemporal musical expression.